176 clifford r. backman
agas of Karin worked because the individuals involved had decided that their practical
self-interest trumped the ideological claims of international politics and holy war.
Rethinking the history of Mediterranean piracyAncient Greek had three words that designated pirates: leistes in Homeric dialect,
katapontistes and peirates in Attic. In their earliest usage, though, both leistes and pei-
rates denoted coastal brigands rather than maritime thieves—that is, marauders on
land who arrived and escaped by sea. Only katapontistes referred indisputably to sea
bandits who preyed on merchant vessels. Peirates, the word that had the determina-
tive etymological significance for the broader Western world, was the latecomer; its
first datable appearances occurred in the middle of the third century bce, when it was
used in several inscriptions in honor of local strategoi who had protected their
communities from plunderers. The Souda, the Byzantine encyclopedia of the tenth
century ce, canonized the distinction between leistes, as sea-borne land marauders,
and peirates, as plunderers on the sea.
Homer is ambivalent about the leistes he describes. He is generally disapproving, yet he
allows Odysseus to indulge himself twice in boastful lying about his escapades at sea.
Appearing in disguise to Eumaeus, his loyal swineherd in Ithaca, he feigns the character of
a Cretan pirate who had neither love for farming, nor home life, nor raising fair children:
Ships I loved, long ships with oars, and fighting with polished lances and arrows—the
sight of which made others tremble. I was made for pillage: the gods put the calling in
me. To each his own! Long before we Achaeans ever shipped out to Troy I led men on
nine voyages to raid foreign lands and was lucky each time, I grew rich with spoils on the
spot and gained still more when we divided the companies’ booty. My house thus
enriched, I walked tall among the Cretans. (Odyssey, 14.222–34, my translation)Braggart that he is, Odysseus values cutting a swashbuckling figure over consoling a
long-suffering servant whose only remaining desire in life is to see his master again.
Later, when he stands (still in disguise) before the hated suitors, he boasts again of his
supposedly former prowess among leistes:
It was Kronos’ son, Zeus, who finally did me in. There’s no telling why he wanted it this
way—but he sent me off to Egypt for my undoing, a long sail to the south with a band
of pirates. I steered our oarsmen up the broad Nile and moored at the river’s bank.
“Stand guard at the ships,” I ordered my men, then sent out patrols to scout from higher
ground, but they were seized by reckless greed and set to plundering the Egyptian farms.
They killed whatever men they found, and dragged away the women and children. The
screaming reached the nearby town, and in no time at all the townsmen came running.
It was dawn, and those townsfolk filled the plain with chariots and infantry, all in gleam-
ing bronze ...
They cut down a slew of my men with their swords and led the rest away to end their
days in slavery. As for me—they handed me over to a traveler who happened by, and
shipped me off to Cyprus. (Odyssey, 17.424–439, my translation)Such passages acknowledge the suffering caused by the leistes but subordinate it to the
heroic bravado of the pirate hero.